Sunday, October 9, 2011

Owning Creations

*a clip from The Philippine Star that unveiled the owner of the sun

Our society too often defines us based on what we own. The world appears to be a huge property to be coveted for, as if by taking a parcel of it under our name bit by bit we are led closer to peace, success, prosperity, happiness, completeness, and all of those abstracts. Our existence is based on what we could own. While this is inevitable—there is a need to own no matter how simple our definition of it is, and I will not be a hypocritical about it—there are some owners that are pretty farfetched. There was one who declared himself as the emperor of USA; Joshua Abraham Norton I is the first and only monarch of the entire United States of America. Lands are named in the name of kings and queens, by tribe or faith. Some already claimed ownership of the celestial bodies: meteors, asteroids, comets, planets. Even our billion year-old sun has an owner. She lives in Spain.

Although we could laugh about it, shrug our shoulders and turn away from these outrageous entertainment (for this is what it is for people—entertainment), there also exist something wrong in this context.

We need not to move beyond our atmosphere, in this country we could see this kind of materialism. Islands sold from person to person, ignoring the people that lived there long before their fathers could learn to walk; look at Fuga island, islands in Palawan, and other places in this archipelago. Land owned in rapacity, and even self-righteousness, is plaguing this country (and the world). And what frightens me is that mostly they are considered legal.

A friend once commented about ownership that lingered in my head. “How could we own something that is older than us…that existed before us?”

Truly, more than the bounds of the laws, ownership should not only be legal but should also be, in every sense, moral.